"Fuck."
"Come on." Knox is standing over me, and in the dim light he looks even bigger than before, shadows carving his face into something stark and almost beautiful. "I'll take you home."
I sit up properly, and everything hurts. My shoulders are locked in a permanent hunch. My spine feels like it's been replaced with rusty hinges. There's a crick in my neck that might be permanent.
The bar is empty except for us. All those huge, tattooed men who were watching me earlier—gone. The pool table sits abandoned, cues still racked on the wall. The kitchen is dark. Even the neon beer signs have been switched off, leaving just their ghostly outlines on the walls.
"Where is everyone?"
"Sent them to bed an hour ago."
An hour ago. Which means he's been here, in this empty bar, for at least an hour. While I slept.
"You stayed?"
He gives me a look I can't interpret. Something complicated moves behind his eyes, there and gone before I can name it. "You're in my bar."
Right. That makes sense. He couldn't exactly leave with a stranger passed out in his booth. Liability issues, probably. Or maybe he was worried I'd steal something. Do people steal from lion shifters? That seems like a spectacularly bad idea.
But he could have woken me up when the storm stopped. Could have sent me on my way and gone to bed himself. Instead, he let me sleep, and he stayed.
I file that away to think about later, when my brain is functioning above survival mode.
The shifter thing. The lion thing. Which I apparently just accepted and then fell asleep about.
Knox moves toward the door, clearly expecting me to follow. I watch him walk—that confident stride, the way he takes up space like he owns it. Which I guess he does. He owns this bar, this territory, probably everything for miles around.
"Can you walk?"
"I'm tired, not broken." I stand to prove it and immediately stumble, my legs refusing to cooperate after being folded under a table for hours. The floor tilts alarmingly.
His hand shoots out, catching my elbow before I can faceplant. His grip is firm but careful, steadying me with an ease that suggests he could hold my entire weight one-handed without breaking a sweat. He probably could.
"When's the last time you slept?" he asks. "Before tonight?"
I try to think. My brain feels like it's wading through molasses. Yesterday—no, the day before—was the morning literacy program, then the afternoon poetry workshop with the teens, then staying late to fight with Margaret about budget allocation for next quarter, then home to change for the datefrom hell, then Derek and his crypto obsession, then walking in the rain, then here...
"Tuesday?" I offer.
"It's Thursday morning."
"Your point?"
He mutters something under his breath that sounds like "ridiculous human" but there's no heat in it. Almost sounds fond, actually, but I'm way too tired to be reading into the emotional undertones of lion shifters.
His hand is still on my elbow. I should probably say something about that. Instead, I just let him steer me toward the door, too exhausted to protest being handled.
"We're taking my bike."
"Bike like bicycle or—"
The question dies as we step outside. The rain has stopped, leaving the world washed clean and gleaming under the streetlights. Everything smells fresh—wet asphalt, ozone, the particular green scent of rain-soaked leaves. And there, parked right by the door like a chrome-and-leather promise of danger, is the motorcycle.
It's massive. Black and silver and gleaming with rain droplets, the kind of machine that belongs in movies or magazines or parked outside bars where men who look like Knox drink whiskey and discuss things like territory and pack dynamics. It probably costs more than my yearly salary. It definitely costs more than my car.
"Of course," I mutter.
Knox is already pulling a helmet from somewhere—a compartment on the back of the bike, maybe—and holding it out to me. It's black with a tinted visor, and when I take it, it's heavier than I expected.
